


if we only live once (i wanna live with you)

by loonyBibliophile



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Fix It Fic, Upd8 fic, because they deserved resolution damn it!, this is not platonic so if you're after that don't read thus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-18
Updated: 2016-04-18
Packaged: 2018-06-03 02:17:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6592606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loonyBibliophile/pseuds/loonyBibliophile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The sun is setting on New Earth for the first time ever. And as she sits alone on a hilltop, the weight of the day hits Roxy in the chest like free falling — dead weight— onto the ocean. A matter of hours ago, the blood of Her Imperial Condescension was on her hands. They’d won… somehow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if we only live once (i wanna live with you)

The sun is setting on New Earth for the first time ever. And as she sits alone on a hilltop, the weight of the day hits Roxy in the chest like free falling — dead weight— onto the ocean. A matter of hours ago, the blood of Her Imperial Condescension was on her hands. They’d won… somehow. She wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, and she wished she did, because maybe it would have stopped the feeling prickling the back of her neck. The feeling that any moment she’d wake up and it would all be gone, or she’d turn around and The Condesce would be right there, all over again. The feeling that it was too good to be true, that after a lifetime of fighting and looking over her shoulder and sleeping in fits and starts it couldn’t really be over. 

She wrapped her arms tight around her knees and the muscles in her hips strained and groaned with battle soreness. She could feel the press of scar tissue on her stomach and across her chest. Looking away from the sunset, she glanced at the others. Earlier, she’d walked in the sunshine with John and Calliope, but Calliope was young, and had opted to follow Jane and Jane’s dad for an early evening in, and John had drifted off to be with his old friends. And she’d wandered off to this hilltop to watch them all from a distance. Sure, she could have followed John, she was sure Dave and Jade and Rose and the troll with the little horns and Rose’s girlfriend Kanaya would have all welcomed her with open arms. But as much as she liked them… they weren’t her friends. Not the way the others were. 

But Roxy was Roxy, at the end of the day, and she wasn’t going to intrude on Jane’s reunion with her dad, whom she’d thought was dead all this time, or…. whatever Dirk and Jake were doing. They hadn’t talked, not really, since their dramatic post trickster breakup. She wouldn’t take the time to apologize and catch up and maybe even reconcile from them. They were still idly kicking a soccer ball back and forth, while the others who remained outside watched from the grass, where Dave, Jade, and their troll friend —Karkat?— had picnicked earlier on. As the sun sunk lower in the sky, she sighed softly and stood, walking in the direction of the house they’d all designated as their living space, for the time being anyway. They’d all go their separate ways in time, she was sure, but for now, they were sticking together. She was tired, and if she joined the others, someone would notice, so really, it was best she just turn in for the night. 

Down on the field, the others laughed loudly, leaning against each other in a pile as Dirk and Jake carried on their game of soccer. Or tried to. Even with Jake also being a god tier, Dirk was far faster, but neither of them knew what they were doing, and eventually Dave got hit in the face with the stray ball, and they all had a good laugh, but the soccer game was called a draw to continue another day. Because they had all the time in the world. So Dirk and Jake settled into the grass with the others, idle chatter taking over without the game to focus on. As Dirk sat with the others, and the adrenaline of the day and the game and the high of victory sloughed away, something felt… wrong. 

Maybe it was just, he thought, that he didn’t know how to do this. How to have friends, how to live a life that isn’t moment to moment, and every one of those moments know full well you could be dead in the next. He didn’t know how to have a future, and none of the people gathered around him understood that. Sure, Jake had lived alone on an island of monsters, but for his early life, he’d had someone. And he’d known, somewhere out there, there was a world. There were people. Jane and John had both had mostly normal lives. Sure, Dave’s brother was a class asshole, but again, there was a world beyond him, and Dave had known that. Same with Rose. Same with Jade. There was only one person who really could get where he was coming from. Who wouldn’t give him That Look if he said he didn’t know how to do this. So he turned to make a joke, to tell Roxy he couldn’t believe they were here, that things could be this normal. But she wasn’t there. So he looked around the group and realized that was what was wrong. Roxy wasn’t with them. He knew Jane and her dad and Calliope had turned in, but hadn’t Roxy come back with John?

“Hey, John. You were with Roxy earlier, where she’d head off to?” Dirk fought down the instinctive panic in his chest. There was no danger here. There was no danger anymore. But it was there anyway, and he silently cursed himself for losing track of her. 

“Oh, uh, I dunno? She was walking with me and Calliope and when Calliope left with Jane and Mr. Crocker she just kinda wandered off. I did wonder why she didn’t come hang out. Figured she was tired, or something.” John shrugged. 

“I’m gonna go look for her.” Dirk stood abruptly and wandered off. Most people nodded at this, though John and the trolls, who hadn’t spent much time around Dirk, seemed puzzled. 

“What is that, anyway?” John wondered out loud, watching Dirk walk off towards the hill Roxy had been on earlier. 

“They were the only two people on their earth. Before they met Jane and myself, they were literally all each other had.” Jake frowned slightly. “I suspect Roxy may still think Dirk is mad at her. I don’t think they’ve talked in quite awhile. Things were… complicated in our session, just before we finally met up with all of you.”

“She spoke very highly of him.” Rose mused, playing with Kanaya’s fingers.

“She cares for him a great deal. More than he knows, I expect.”

Back at the house, Roxy had settled into the room she’d claimed as her own earlier on, putting out her handful of possessions from her old life. As she placed a framed photo of Frigglish on the table, she wondered if New Earth had cats. She hoped it did. They would be familiar, if nothing else. Putting her laptop on the bed, she fought the urge to find the alchemizer and make several elaborate security routers. She didn’t need them here. She repeated this to herself in her head, over and over, not realizing she’d stalled in her motions and was standing stock still in the middle of the room, staring at her bed. 

“Hey.” a voice said from the doorway, and before its owner registered, Roxy leapt about a foot in the air. 

“Sorry. Hey. Tired of playin’ the ol’ sport ball?”

“Accidentally hit Dave in the face with the ball.” 

“Like a true older brother.” 

“So what’s up?” Dirk slid his hands in his pockets, and Roxy swore she could see the crook of his eyebrow over his shades. 

“Just tired. Been a long few days.” Roxy shrugged, biting back the nervous tick to pull her teeth over her lip, the one she knew Dirk would recognize, having seen her do it thousands of time over video chat. 

“It has. Very long. Why didn’t you come celebrate?”

“Just didn’t feel like it, I guess. Last party I was at didn’t work out too well, ya know.”

“Ah yes. The infamous birthday party.”

“More like birthday trainwreck.” Roxy scoffed, hands flexing slightly. She and Dirk hadn’t been alone since they were sitting silent on their quest beds waiting to die. She has a million things to say and at least half of them are sorry. Sorry for being drunk, sorry for relapsing, sorry for hitting on him, sorry for kissing him, sorry for not being the best friend he deserved. She wants to tell him about fighting The Condesce, about how it felt to sink a sword through her back and have her blood on her hands. She wants to tell him about having to walk out of their universe because everything was doomed. She wants to give him a hug. She wants him to hug her, to cross the room and wrap his arms around her, but it’s impossible and she knows it so she doesn’t do anything but stand there. And neither does he. 

She looks down at the floor and as silence soaks into the room and her skin she wonders if they even have any reason to be friends anymore. If they have anything in common without loney and isolation keeping them tied together, just tight enough and just close enough not to drown in it. Maybe now that he has people, and she guesses she does too, and things to do and not just ocean and survival and terror… maybe without all that whatever they were will just be gone. Maybe that’s the price to pay for safety. You give up what you love most in the world. She dragged her teeth of her lower lip, smearing black lipstick onto pearly whites. Dirk sighed.

“We should probably have a conversation.” 

“I know.. I just-” and suddenly it’s all pouring out and she couldn’t stop it if she tried and she thinks she might be crying but honestly, she isn’t sure. “I’ve been avoiding it because I didn’t want to ruin the victory with an argument, even though you have every right to be mad at me, and I’m so, so sorry for everything I did, and I don’t just mean getting drunk and sugar crazy and making out with you even though that was terrible and unforgivable but I’m also sorry for hitting on you and for being a shitty friend and you don’t actually know this but I had to ditch out on our timeline because everyone was dying and I just… I should have been the best friend you deserved and needed and I wasn’t.” 

This is, to say the least, not a situation Dirk knows how to handle. He does know, however, that staring at Roxy in absolute silence is not going to help. He’s not that dense, thank you. In the end, he settles on logic, before he can second guess himself. 

“Roxy… I’m not mad at you. I never was. I asked Jane to tell you but… well, we blew up, and also it’s possible she said she wouldn’t, because she wanted me to tell you myself, and then mostly we were trying to win a war.”

“Wait, what? Why not?”

“Why would I be? Roxy our lives aren’t normal. Yeah, maybe you were drunk and hit on me, but I was literally the only other person in the world. And let’s not count the whole trickster mess, just… let’s not. Let’s not talk about that ever again. It’s not like I was such a peach either, going on about my crush on Jake. I guess… I knew how—”

“Please don’t.” Roxy’s voice is quiet, almost a whisper, and Dirk almost doesn’t hear her but he does, and it stops his words dead. “Please don’t say it. I know you knew, it was obvious, and I knew it was silly and dumb and sometimes fucked up and hopeless. I knew and I know now but I just can’t hear you talk about it out loud yet, okay?” Her eyes look desperate, so Dirk swallows and nods.

“Then I’ll leave it at I’m sorry too. We both fucked up, Roxy. More than that, actually, all of us fucked up. But I have something else I need to tell you, because Jake and Jane and I all screwed up really bad and I don’t think any of us has ever owned up to it. We would have been completely fucked without you, Roxy. We would have been dead in the water months ago if it weren’t for you. You were the only one of us to get your shit together, and you did it while keeping us from killing each other or falling apart. I’m not mad at you, Rox. I’m proud. I’m so, so proud. And now, after Rose and John and the others told me about how you fought, and how you killed Sea Hitler? You’re the best of us. You always were. If either of us deserved better, it was you. It is you. Not me.”

Roxy looked up at him, wide eyed and slack jawed. Her eyes looked watery, like maybe she was about to cry. She was stunned, and absolutely at a loss for what to do or say. Not only was that by a landslide the most words she’d ever heard Dirk use at one time, but it was the last thing she would have ever expected him to say. She teared up in earnest, but she didn’t start crying until he rolled his eyes and held his arms open. She didn’t hesitate a second before flinging herself into them. And she was pleasantly surprised when he didn’t just let her cling to him, but wrapped his arms around her in return. 

“I was so scared when I saw you on the ground with your neck all bloody. I was afraid Jane wouldn’t be able to save you and that you’d- you’d just be gone. For good” she mumbled into the fabric of his shirt, probably staining it with teary mascara and smudgy black lipstick. His thumb rubbed across her shoulder blade, and he let out a long breath. 

“My powers… They have this passive side effect. I know about my other selves. A different version of me somehow felt you leave that timeline, the one that was doomed. He — I— thought you were dead, and everyone else already was and it was just the last straw and that version of me just… let himself disappear.” 

They both fell silent again then, Roxy’s face pressed into Dirk’s chest, one of his broad hands on the back of her head and the other the small of her back. But the silence doesn’t feel like suffocating or drowning anymore. It’s the warm waves of tropical ocean lapping at the shore, or bathwater soaking hurt from tired and cold bones. 

“I wouldn’t wanna do this without you, Dirky.” Roxy says, finally breaking the silence. She tugs away slightly, only to pull Dirk towards the edge of her bed. He complies, sitting down and letting her curl against him, and she is tired, and she thought she was going to lose him, so she lets herself take what she can get. “I… I don’t know how to do this in the first place.” 

“Me neither, Rox.” He doesn’t specify which statement he agrees with, and she knows that’s his way of agreeing with both without having to say he wouldn’t know what to do without her either, so she wraps both her wiry, bone arms around one of his wide biceps and stares down at the different scars crisscrossing both of their skin, the flags of a lifetime of fighting. 

“How do we just… stop? How do we stop fighting and looking over our shoulders and expecting to die at any moment?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

“What if we can’t figure it out?” Roxy tilts her head, still pressed against his shoulder, so she can look at him. She can see him actually think, and if she was a weaker person, she would let herself have a long, dreamy internal sigh about his face. And its proximity to her face. 

“We keep going anyway. After all, that seems to be what you and I do best. Keep going regardless of the odds, or actual knowledge of what the fuck is going on.” 

“That is true.” Roxy replies, with a snort in spite of herself. 

“So, should we go rejoin the group?” Dirk straightened himself up slightly, turning to look over at Roxy. She blinked, looked like she was about to say something, then nodded. 

“Yeah, of course. Let’s go you know, party, or whatever.” Roxy grinned, but if Dirk knew anything, it was Roxy’s face, and the tiny quirks and micro expressions he could see through their video screens were even more evident in person, magnified by the clarity of real life, and the wideness of mascara-ed eyes. He frowned, squinting at her from behind his shades. 

“You know… you can ask for things, Rox. You can ask to stay here. You can ask me to hang out with you. You know that right?”

“Of course I know I can ask for things, I used to ask you shit all the time.”

“But not for real. You always made it a joke, or backed out, or stepped around it. And maybe we —no, I should have, not we, me— should have pushed you. I know… knew you better than anyone. I should have… tried more.” 

“Not knew. Know. It’s still present tense. Don’t worry Dirky, you still know me better than anyone else, I didn’t replace you.” There’s a note of teasing in her voice, and she bumps his shoulder with hers. 

“Oh really?” Dirk smirks, just slightly. “You mean you haven’t replaced me with our new friend John?” She knows he’s joking, but his words hit her strangely anyhow, and she blinks, frowning. 

“Dirk… I’ve known John for like, three days. And even if I’d known him as long as Jake, or Jane, or whoever, it wouldn’t change anything. No one else could ever be what you are to me.”

Dirk hadn’t known he’d been waiting to hear something until that exact moment when Roxy spoke. And then all in a rush he realized he hadn’t just been waiting for it in response to the Joke about John, or throughout this conversation, but that it was what he’d been waiting to hear since he woke up one morning and realized he had the ability to feel things for other people. He’d thought he’d found that, for awhile anyway, with Jake. But that had fallen apart fucking spectacularly. And now, suddenly here was his best friend, the one person who had seen him at his absolute worse, this person who had listened to him whine on and on about Jake even though she had feelings for him herself, this person who knew exactly how awful and angry and selfish he could be, and despite all that, she was telling him no one else could be as much to her as he was. It was like the moment in the allegory of the caves when the people were unchained and could see the real world instead of just its shadows. This was what he was waiting for. Everything else was just shadows. 

So he made good on all his months old promises to become a man of action and made possibly the most rash and questionable decision of his entire life; He grabbed Roxy Lalonde’s face between his hands and he kissed her. 

Roxy’s first impulse was emotional self defense. Pull away, forget it ever happened, don’t let yourself get invested. Don’t have hope. But she realized Dirk wasn’t just kissing her. His right hand was cradling the back of her head and his left thumb was stroking her cheek and suddenly she could just feel herself saying ‘fuck it’ and leaning into him. Maybe this was a terrible idea, but goddamn if it wasn’t the best terrible idea she’d ever had. Nothing had ever felt so warm and solid and real and home than the heavy warmth of Dirk’s chest pressing into her and the pressure of his lips against her own and the gentle rub of calloused fingers on her skin. It was so, so much better than 12 year old her had dreamed it would be. In the end, she was the one to pull back for breath, but she left her hands clutched in the fabric of his shirt, afraid if she let go and severed contact the bubble would bursts and the moment would be gone forever. 

“You kissed me.” she whispered, breathless, staring down at his chest. 

“Yes.”

“But I’m not dead.”

“No, no you are not.”

“Why?” she looks up at him finally, and behind the tiny flicker of hope in her eyes is a much bigger flicker of fear. Fear this was a mistake, that it would ruin something, take away someone she’d just barely gotten back. 

“I wanted to.”

“But… you.. me… Jake… you’re gay!” 

“No, I just like boys.”

“I’m not a boy!” her fists tightened in his shirt, desperation rising slightly in her voice, and Dirk started to panic. He’d just calmed her down, he’d just gotten her back, this was not how he thought this was going to go.

“No, you’re not. But you’re hardly just another girl, either. You’re… Roxy. That’s why I wanted to kiss you. Not because you’re a girl, but because you’re Roxy. You’re.. different.” 

“Special?” she smiled, soft and small and quiet and Dirk couldn’t help but quirk a small grin in response, nodding. 

“Yeah. Special. You’re special.”

Dirk leaned forward slightly more, sliding his hand across Roxy’s lower back and pressing her towards him again, and she gladly collapsed into his chest, practically curling into his lap. She tucked her head underneath his chin, her face pressed into his neck as her warm breath ghosted over the scar there. 

“I don’t wanna go back to our friends. Not right now. We.. we have the rest of…. forever, basically, to make amends and get to know them and get to know them better but you and I have been fighting longer than anyone. Maybe we… deserve sometime just. For us. Whatever shape ‘us’ ends up taking.”

“I think that sounds like a good idea.” 

“Wanna just… watch a movie? Do the kind of painfully normal shit we never had a chance to do at all, let alone together?”

“A movie sounds fucking excellent. What do you want to watch?”

“I’m down with whatever as long as it has a happy ending and no one dies a bloody death on screen.”

“That’s fair.”

Dirk stood and Roxy followed, expecting him to pick up the computer and move out to the living room. Instead, he carried the laptop back into Roxy’s bed, sitting up by her pillows and leaving a Roxy sized space between himself and the wall. He patted the space and raised an eyebrow. Roxy practically leapt over, and burrowed up next to him and under the blankets, cuddling into his side. Her cheek was pressed into his chest, and her arms were wiry and warm around his torso, one of her legs hooked between his knees. With a few clicks of the trackpad, the first Harry Potter movie flashed on the screen. Roxy beamed up at him, and he chuckled a little, wrapping his arm around her tightly. 

By the time the troll was smashing up the bathroom, both of them were fast asleep. The first real, deep sleep either of them had gotten in months, maybe years. Maybe ever. Sometime around two am, when the others were finally winding down for bed, Jake and Jane slipped into the room to make sure Dirk had indeed found Roxy. They smiled softly at each other when they found them, curled tightly around one another and snoring softly. So Jane pulled a blanket over them and moved the laptop while Jake flicked off the lights, and they closed the door as they left. The slight movement stirred Dirk, just enough to crack an eye open and see Roxy asleep, curled against him. He smiled, because no one was there to see him, and pressed a careful kiss on the crown of her head. 

“Worth it all” he mumbled, sleepy and quiet, before shifting them both to a more comfortable position. “Worth it all.” 

“You were too. Softie.” Roxy mumbled, voice rough and sleepy as she blinked up at him through fluttering lashes for a moment before dipping back into slumber. Instead of feeling embarrassed at being caught in his moment of open affection, and simply pressed him hand against the smooth skin of Roxy’s shoulder and focused on the soft sound of her breathing and the way it slowly matched itself to the rhythm of his heart.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still gutted about Dirk and Roxy never getting to sit down and have a talk, and honestly, what the hell as with the last ever shot of her being with John, a dude she has known for three days? Absurd. Hope this was satisfying for all my other poor shippers in this very leaky ship! <3


End file.
